Why Are Adults on the Internet So Obsessed with Disney Princesses?

Once upon a time, on a perfect late-spring morning, overlooking the greenest of Central Park’s meadows, a blogger languished in her chambers in the tippy top floor of her fortified (read: doorman) apartment tower. In the corner, a squirrel strummed a lute as the blogger sang a pretty song about seeking inspiration for her posts that day. As two bluebirds fastened a buttery-soft leather belt around her magical 17-inch waist, it came to her. “Disney princesses!” she sang to her tiny kitten, Oliver. “Oh, Oliver, I can’t WAIT to see what Facebook says!” So she sat down and assembled some pretty pictures of the rings Disney princesses might wear, and some GIFs of the fashion tips they might espouse. And, as if with the wave of the Good Witch’s wand, her work went 10 times as viral as her last video Instagram of Oliver trying to crawl out of a mason jar. Satisfied, she turned to Pinterest and started searching for a D.I.Y. hack for painting an ombré-accented wall.

Now the truth about bloggers: lute-playing squirrels sadly do not accompany us while we work, and for the most part birds do not fly around wrapping belts about us. But it is true that posts about Disney princesses are extremely—almost bizarrely—viral. Of all the Internet’s most popular subjects, from the Kardashians to real-life duchesses, to first dogs that take selfies, Disney princesses routinely prove superiorly captivating, whether the posts are shallow, analytical, disturbing, or hilarious. And it’s not children keeping the content afloat by sharing it in a sea of endless, fascinating-for-two-minutes updates—it’s adults.

The adult obsession with Disney princesses online tends to come in one of two flavors. There’s the child-like enthusiasm for ANYTHING Disney-princess-related, because Disney princesses are the bestest. Not to mention the act of remembering things through the Internet—especially from the year 1991—because doing that is also the bestest. Alternatively, there’s the cynical, analytical perspective about how Disney princesses corrupt the psyches of our nation’s young daughters, promoting unrealistic and damaging ideals about how they should look and the kinds of lives they should lead when they grow up.

Dina Goldstein’s provocative “Fallen Princesses” photo essay depicting Disney heroines in real-life situations shows just how sticky they can be on the Internet, thanks to social networks. Goldstein’s images made the Facebook rounds over the past couple of weeks, but it’s hardly a new project—the photos have gone viral several times since first hitting the Internet, in 2009. The series, which Goldstein worked on from 2007 to 2010, shows one princess sitting on a pile of mattresses in the middle of the dump, Snow White as a mom of four in a seemingly loveless marriage, Pocahantas sitting in front of a TV in a mundane living room surrounded by cats, and a bald Rapunzel sitting on a hospital bed, gripping an IV.

‘There’s always controversy around it,” said Goldstein, who was born in in Israel and moved to Canada when she was eight, and “was never into Disney princesses.” She decided to create the “Fallen Princess” series when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she describes as “a very dark time.” She said she found herself wondering then, “What if a perfect princess had to be diagnosed with cancer and had to deal with life-threatening diseases and everything else going on in the world?”

Goldstein uses her Facebook page to address the controversy surrounding her project. She recently posted this letter from one of her many critics:

“I got my happily ever after and I couldn’t have asked for a more amazing husband. Maybe she should have made better decisions throughout her life and her ‘reality’ wouldn’t suck so bad. So she is blaming her poor decisions in life (which must have led to her having such a sucky reality) on fairytales rather than making good decisions. People need to start taking responsibility for their poor decisions and stop blaming everyone and everything else.”

Goldsteins reply: “Let’s see: I have a great husband and two gorgeous girls . . . and yet I still have the ability to see that other people suffer sometimes.”

She also posted this, from an admirer:

“I actually grew up in a castle (complete with turrets, towers and a ballroom) in the beautiful country-side of Scotland, and felt like a lucky princess much of my life. In the past few years I’ve experienced some of the most painful life experiences from the death of a very close friend to cancer, to losing my home to foreclosure—and my handsome prince, whom I’ve been married to for 17 years went through his own life crisis and both our hearts were broken in the process. So . . . thanks. I am still finding my happily ever after and pursuing the dream of happiness, but I deeply relate to your work.”

Goldstein wants her work to inspire people to think about heartache and hardship around them, even if it isn’t immediately affecting them. Virtually everyone must deal with horrific events at various points in their lives—a reality that the Disney-princess narrative neatly eschews time and time again.

“I just think people should have their eyes open a little wider to the world,” Goldstein said. “And people who are wrapped up in Disney princesses don’t tend to be those kinds of people.” Neither, many would argue, are some social-media addicts, who use Facebook and Pinterest primarily as a means of advertising their perfect lives to the world. Research suggests that looking at social media might lead to depression, because people mostly use these sites to boast about their happiest occasions—weddings, getting an M.B.A., or, if you’re a rich kid on Instagram, flying privately with a giant man purse full of cash. People tend to not use social networks to talk to their “friends” or followers about struggles with addiction, divorce, loneliness, and depression. In a way, social media enables users to create fairy-tale images of their lives for a hand-selected group of people. Is it any wonder so many of them fetishize the Disney-princess life into adulthood, becoming fierce defenders of them in their Disney-given form? Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be a princess. A fake, catfish-y princess, in some cases, but a princess nonetheless.

The very thing that repels some people from princess-fan posts probably also repels people from social media: the aura of perfection and the mindless enthusiasm over nothing. There’s as much viral content to get angry about as there is to celebrate. Those whose commentary goes beyond knee-jerk reactions, like Goldstein’s, are the at once celebrated and loathed outliers